A view from Greece: the end of the Kemalist military

"The military academies have been dissolved and immediately closed and the chiefs of the Turkish armed forces will be placed under the Secretary of Defense" the president of the country Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced tonight.Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who made these statements during the interview with the television channel A Haber, added further that the military academies will be replaced by a "National Defense University".

This is the most important and most critical decision of the Turkish leader to acquire control over the direction of the country.

This would be like -- if related to the Greek military schools for officers and noncommissioned officers -- they closed the Military Academy, the Naval Academy, the Air Force Academy, the MTA and all!This decision will be published tomorrow in Turkish Official Gazette.The move is really shocking, changing the entire military training regime in Turkey and it uproots anything related to the Kemalist character of the army.It is too early to assess whether it will be positive or negative in the long term for the operational reliability of the Turkish armed forces, but it is certain that at least in the near term, the graduation or preparation of new Turkish officers will suffer a major blow.The end result will look just like the uprooting of German militarism when Prussia, the cradle of elite German officers, was partitioned between Poland and the Soviet Union and its population eradicated or exterminated to stop generating the necessary human material for feeding the German military machine.The current uprooting of the Kemalist military establishment is analogous, but for other reasons: To create a military elite, faithful to Islam and the neo-Ottoman plans of the ruling political class of the neighboring country.The Chiefs of Staff of armed forces will report to the defense minister, and so far as it seems good, it shows that for the first time the political leadership of the Turkish Republic would have "the first word" against the military leadership, aiming at more close control of the army by the "political" Islam that now rather dominates the neighboring country. Follow us on Facebook! Follow us on Twitter! Donate!